Category Archives: Windows 10

As you probably know, duplicate SPNs cause Kerberos authentication errors in AD DS domains. You may notice it by looking for KRB_AP_ERR_MODIFIED errors and Event ID 11 in system logs. With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft released a largely improved version of setspn, which includes “-x” switch to help you proactively monitor your infrastructure for duplicate SPNs. Combined with “-f” switch, setspn output contains duplicate SPNs not only from a single domain, but from a whole AD DS forest. Many companies rely on a result of “setspn -x -f” command as a data source for monitoring systems.

Today I found, that all these years almost nobody noticed that “setspn -x” command compares SPNs case-sensitively, i.e. following SPNs will be considered different and will not be shown in the output:

HOST/SERVERNAME

HOST/ServerName

Starting from Windows 10, Microsoft changed behavior of setspn to case-insensitive, and, from now on, every duplicated SPN will be displayed in setspn output, disregarding its case.

While Microsoft asserts, that Windows is case-insensitive to SPNs, not every Microsoft product agrees: for example, Shane Young found that you must pay attention to SPNs used by SharePoint accounts.

As a conclusion, I suggest every AD DS administrator to check their infrastructure with the setspn tool shipped with Windows 10, at least once. It allows you to find TRULY EVERY duplicate SPN (I did found a couple, myself ;).